Carl had gone home for Christmas. He had offered to stay, said to Louise that he didn’t like to leave her when she was in the middle of a crisis.
‘You’re fine,’ she insisted. ‘We’ll spend most of the time at the hospital anyway. Besides, your mother’d kill me.’
He’d grinned. Carl had told her all about his mother, an old-school matriarch who would clout her kids for the slightest indiscretion and was fierce as a tiger in their defence. Carl was the baby. He tried to get back once a year, at Christmas time. He’d spend almost three days travelling there on coaches and trains.
‘We’ll take our presents in to Luke,’ Louise told Ruby on Christmas Eve. ‘Open them there.’
‘I thought we weren’t doing anything.’ Ruby was practising her dance routine; none of their rooms were really big enough, but it was too muddy for her to do it outside. After the holiday she’d be able to use the school dance studio during lunch break.
‘Well I’ve got you both a little thing,’ Louise said. ‘I’m not taking it back. And you’d better have got me something.’ Knowing full well that Ruby had done her Christmas shopping and had made a point of asking Louise on three separate occasions what her favourite colour was.
‘Tuck your chin in,’ Louise said.
‘Since when were you the expert?’ Ruby asked, altering her stance and doing a sidestep and slide.
‘You look like you’re straining, that’s all, like a nervous chicken.’
‘Mum!’
‘Suit yourself.’ Louise went into the kitchen. ‘Soup or soup?’ she called.
‘Soup – tomato.’
‘Right first time.’
Shrek 3 was on the box. Louise had a shower and sat with Ruby to watch the second half. Ruby was texting every few minutes. Her phone trilling with each reply.
‘That Becky?’ Louise asked.
‘Yeah, she wants me to go over Boxing Day, sleep over.’
‘Good idea.’
‘I don’t know,’ Ruby said.
Louise wanted Ruby to have a break, escape the tension and tedium of hospital visits. She was aware that Ruby was worried about her, was keen to be there and help, but Louise wanted her to have a chance to relax with her friends, the freedom to set it all aside for a few hours. ‘Hey.’ She waited for Ruby to look at her. ‘I’ll be fine, it’ll do you good.’
Ruby wrinkled her nose.
‘Don’t you want to?’ Louise asked.
‘I suppose.’
‘Say yes, then.’ Louise turned back to the film. The donkey talking a mile a minute. There was something of that donkey in Luke. The irrepressible energy, the impulsiveness.
‘What the hell did you do it for?’ she’d demanded of him after the fireworks palaver. Luke had bought contraband Chinese fireworks, mortars, and set them off in two wheelie bins. Destroying both bins and setting the nearby fence alight, triggering a car alarm and waking half the neighbourhood.
‘To see what’d happen,’ he said. And then a glint dancing in his eye at the memory. ‘It was awesome – like a bomb.’
‘Jesus, Luke. It was dangerous, that’s what it was – and stupid. You could have taken your head off.’
‘No, they’ve a long fuse, there was plenty of time,’ reassuring her.
The police had cautioned him and warned her. They used all the clichés: off the rails and slippery slope. One of them did the talking, with the other just chipping in now and again, a cold face on him and a lick of malice in the cast of his eyes, the curl of his lips. She marked him as a bigot. Probably disapproved of her, prejudiced against Luke. Single mother, mixed-race kid.
She’d lost track of the number of times complete strangers had tried to have a cosy little chinwag with her bemoaning immigration and the flood of Pakis/Poles/blacks into the area stealing jobs/shops/school places, assuming she shared their Little Englander views. A different matter when she had the children with her: sleeping with the enemy then. She saw that there were issues for Luke and Ruby caught between two cultures, two identities. Ruby had come home from school in tears aged nine after being called a coconut (black on the outside, white inside) in the playground. Louise did all she could to inform them of their backgrounds, but that was hard when neither of their fathers were around and they didn’t have access to their extended families.
